Jumanji The Next Level 4K 2019 Ultra HD 2160p

After traveling through the virtual forests of Jumanji, the four main characters seem to find peace. But one day they have to return to the game and explore new territories, simultaneously fighting off enemies. However, by a random mistake, together with two already familiar teenagers, those who least expect to see in front of a game monitor are inside digital reality.

Jumanji The Next Level 4K Review
Some time has passed since the events of “Call of the Jungle”: friends from the last part scattered where to live their lives and enjoy a new day. Not happy about one Spencer (Alex Woolf), who studies in cold New York, moonlighting at a terrible job and, due to his stiffness, lost his relationship with Martha (Morgan Turner). Returning home for the holidays, instead of meeting his friends, he decides to launch the Jumanji alone, which, contrary to the promise, he did not destroy. Realizing what happened, friends go after him and accidentally (console something broken) take with them the grandfather of Spencer Eddie (Danny DeVito) and Mr. Milo (Danny Glover) - Eddie's once close friend with whom they had long quarreled over some business -conflict.

The updated Jumanji, you see, the franchise is very strange. In an age when even cult episodes cannot be restarted so as not to get another catastrophic failure (look at Terminator, they’re breaking it off for the third time), a film based on a movie of twenty years ago that wasn’t much commercial or critical success, not even, actually, a franchise. And suddenly it turns out to be a huge hit, collects almost a billion at the global box office and, together with a win-win “Spider-Man”, takes Sony's film division out of a series of box office failures.

And it’s completely not clear where such success came from: “The Call of the Jungle” didn’t really work as a nostalgic adventure game (certainly not against the backdrop of “Awakening of Power” or “First Player to Get Ready”), but its most interesting part is the understanding of game conventions in the format cinema - could hardly catch a young audience, if only because it was made with rather outdated optics. It was a sterile action comedy with 3.6 x-rays - neither good nor terrible - and, it seems, even the authors did not understand the reason for its outstanding popularity. And so in the sequel, just in case, they decided to shoot about the same thing - and even without any familiar sequels, “more, better, stronger”. Just the same thing.

The only striking difference of the “New Level” is the inclusion of two old-character characters, charming Danny DeVito and Danny Glover. They are associated with the most successful scenes of the film (and the only truly funny gag in which DeVito, having already left the game, uses "incinerating charisma") and the theme of the acceptance of death that suddenly appeared in a cute blockbuster. Which, of course, is simple and banal, but in theory it could lead a movie into interesting moral jungle - the Jumanji just treats it very strange: too ridiculous to find it melodramatic, and very tearful to perceive as subtle irony.

The film exploits the charm of its old men as ineptly as possible: most of the time the heroes of DeVito and Glover are hidden under the skin of the grimacing Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, and then also the Aquafins, who are equally terribly trying to convey their colorful tricks. So interesting in theory, a shift in perspective turns into an object of monotonous boring jokes in the genre of “ok, boomer” - which at the same time sound very Boomer and clearly without a special understanding of the subject (that is, video games).

It’s understandable: the director Jake Kazdan himself is already under fifty dollars, and his familiarity (simplicity?) Is enough only to repeat familiar jokes about NPCs (in the first part it was even funny) and the stereotypical subtitle “New Level” (the third part, apparently, will be "Game over"). Actually, of course, there is no “new level” here - just a change of scenery and a dull backtracking on the once-working gags and repeated meanings about gaining oneself through living real emotions in a virtual space. It’s cool, of course, that we moved from the morality of “games - evil” to the maxim of “games - norms, if we leave them”, but, sorry, Spielberg did it better, more drively and much more beautifully.